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I have 7 colonized quarts of WBS, nine mini-bales of straw, and fifteen pounds of worm castings. I'm planning on using a ten gallon rubbermaid. I'm thinking I'll use about three of the mini-bales of straw and half the worm castings. I might use less straw, because I know it'll "fluff" out to be a lot more than it appears while baled up. I'll mix up the pasteurized worm castings and straw in a seperate ten gallon rubbermaid then layer with the colinized WBS. I was planning on doing 9 or ten inches of substrate depth, but I recently read that you can have too much depth. The revised plan calls for 5-6 inches of substrate.

Any advice?

--Cooltuba

--------------------Above musings are entirely fictional. I do not grow mushrooms nor do I associate with anyone who does.

Mycofile, in his bulk neglect report ( click here ) reccomends a layer of pure manure (or in your case worm castings) as the final substrate layer, as he believes straw to be more prone to contamination, and believes the layer to protec the straw. I have had great success copying his method.

Thanks for the excellent advice, Odium! (and Mycofile) It's things like that that I'm looking for. I'll definately put a layer of worm castings on top. Another thing that I'm going to do that I forgot to mention is mixing verm. with the worm castings. The ratio is 1:3 verm:castings. I am un-decided as to how to pasteurize the worm castings. The straw will be pasteurized in water @ 170 for an hour. I'm thinking pasteurizing the worm castings in water would make them too wet, so maybe I'll put them in the oven at 170 for an hour. Any thoughts?

--Cooltuba

--------------------Above musings are entirely fictional. I do not grow mushrooms nor do I associate with anyone who does.